What the Uberization of Retail Might Actually Look Like

This past holiday season, a friend of mine made some extra cash as a driver for Amazon. He described a process where he got some minimal training, downloaded an app, in a very Uber-like experience, searched for available shifts, signed up to accept shifts, and was directed where to go. He would pull up to the Amazon distribution center, load up his car with parcels, and then follow turn-by-turn directions provided by Amazon’s app, to deliver packages to front porches. He would accept shifts as 4-hour blocks, and deliver as many as 80-100 packages, sometimes in a space as small as one square mile. He estimated, after the costs to his car, that he made about $20/hour.

As he described this work, I felt as though I was seeing how the “Uberization” of retail might actually work. I had not thought it would be possible, but whether a good thing or a bad thing (another thing I’m not sure about), I think this kind of gig-economy work may be coming to retail sometime soon.

Imagine this future:

Sophia is a retail sales associate. She currently works shifts for a major women’s fashion retailer, let’s call it Aperture Fashions. She likes the job, but the company can’t give her enough shifts to pay the bills, so she signs up for a training class at Speculate Clothing. Her friend Jacob takes shifts from Speculate and he tells her the shift premiums are often better than at Aperture.

The training class is fun, with some time spent on how to use the Speculate sales app, some time spent on what kind of service Speculate customers expect, including how to manage in-store picking and returns, and the rest of the time spent on Speculate products and the trends that Speculate thinks is important to its shoppers. Sophia passes the final exam with flying colors, which gets her an account on the sales app, her first two badges (Training Level 1 and High Performer).

She inputs the hours she’s willing to work for Speculate into the app and gets access to her first shift offers. There aren’t that many, and the pay is at the bottom of the pay scale, but that’s okay. She’s new and she knows it. She’ll complete some more training modules during her free time over the next week, which will expand the shifts she’ll be eligible for in the future. And once she gets in and starts selling, she’s confident she’ll rack up performance bonuses that’ll make that low shift payment offer look much better, and soon. She accepts her first shift for tomorrow afternoon at Store #231, and heads off to this afternoon’s shift at Aperture.

It’s a slow day at Aperture, so Sophia spends some time on Aperture training, in the hopes it will broaden the shifts she can claim at the company. She helps a few customers, picks a few ship-from-store orders, and then gets her first good news of the shift – one of the customers she helped earlier liked her service and not only gave her a 5-star rating, the woman followed her in the customer-facing version of the Aperture app, which means Sophia can make personal product recommendations and share her shift schedule, all within the app. If the woman who followed her responds to Sophia’s recommendations, whether online or in store, Sophia will get a performance bonus on her next shift.

Just as Sophia’s shift at Aperture is ending, she gets an alert from the Speculate app. Another sales associate cancelled their shift for tomorrow morning. Because Sophia is already working an afternoon shift for Speculate, the Speculate app is offering her the morning shift as well. There is no shift premium yet, because Sophia doesn’t have any experience working for Speculate, but the app shows that traffic tomorrow morning is expected to be higher than average, so Sophia has a chance to hit a performance bonus for sales during her shift. She’s not working for Aperture tomorrow anyway, so she accepts the morning shift. If she had not accepted it, the shift would’ve been offered to a wider pool of employees for someone to claim.

A silly thought experiment, but there are some important points to consider, when thinking about the future of work and retail:

Amazon’s shift work scenario of “meet my qualifications and I’ll offer you short-term contracts for work” could apply to general retail, so long as retailers are willing to embrace the idea that it’s not how the work is performed, it’s the results that count. That’s a big “if”. But it’s possible.

Pay for performance dependent on how the store performs during the time the store associate is working. Bonus, like surge pricing, for coming in last minute, or for the store hitting or exceeding sales goals during the time the associate is working.

Pay for performance dependent on winning customer engagement and/or loyalty, either through following the recommendations of a specific store associate or store, or interacting with store associates in ways that lead to sales.

Making training something optional and gamified can theoretically push it off to employees’ own free time, as long as there are actual pay incentives based on completing the training.

An app as the primary method for a store associate to interact with the retailer – to get schedules and available shifts, to access training, to serve customers, and to get performance feedback.

I don’t know if this is a good future or a bad one. There are arguments on both sides. If there is a clear path for store associates to more training leading to better pay or a more direct tie between store performance and the associates who work there, then it could potentially turn retail into a more desirable – if also less predictable – job. There is the potential for retailers to take advantage of workers in this kind of situation, as efforts in New York escalated to where the state Attorney General – a coalition of several, actually – negotiated the end of on-call shifts for store employees at several retailers.

But retailers need a lot of flexibility, and workers need a lot of stability. Visibility – and flexible but predictable shifts – might actually meet the needs of both groups. If there is no set schedule, but only a claiming of available shifts from qualified workers, with priorities in claiming shifts based on historical work performance, workers can balance it out for themselves whether they want to invest more time in one retailer or another. And if they have free time and want to work a shift, they can claim it, much as my friend claimed available shifts from Amazon, which gave him the opportunity to work more hours if he wanted to when he had the time available.

It’s not pretty, and it’s not a future that is here for retail yet – but it is possible.

I am the vice president of Retail Innovation at Aptos, a retail enterprise solution provider. I am charged with accelerating retailers’ ability to innovate. I have been a top global retail industry influencer for several years, with a background in retail and technology. I r...